October 2017 From the IFAC President

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Spotlight on IFAC awards

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

As you are all aware, humankind is facing tre-mendous technological challenges and opportu-nities at present, for almost all of which control and automation are important components. Re-quirements and expectations on the control and automation solutions are constantly growing and it requires ever increasing methodological and technical knowledge to address these increas-ingly complex and complicated tasks.

Fortunately, our community has always been able to attract some of the brightest people to the field that are working in industry and research institutions. It is essential to make sure that our field remains attractive for young people, so that many of the best choose this direction. Excellent educational programs, constant renewal and inclusion of novel ideas and the proper com-munication of our role, values and success are very important for this. But so is recognition. IFAC therefore recognizes great achievements and talent through its awards program granting IFAC prizes for different achievements in various categories.

Five IFAC Major Awards honor extraordinary life-time contributions, outstanding contributions to methods, tools and instrumentation, high impact papers, significant contributions to industrial ap-plications of control and the outstanding con-tributions of a young researcher. Distinguished individuals may be honored by the IFAC Council as IFAC Fellows for their extraordinary contribu-tions in our field. The relevance of education is emphasized through the Harold Chestnut Con-trol Engineering Textbook Prize.

Furthermore, the Journal Awards, which are awarded every three years, acknowledge the best research articles published in the IFAC Journals and the Congress Prizes honor the best papers presented at the IFAC World Congress including the best paper in the area of applica-tions, the best paper by a young author and the best interactive paper. While the space in this column is quite limited, check out our webpage www.ifac-control.org for more details on all IFAC awards and see some of the other articles in this newsletter.

For identifying award-worthy candidates for each award, IFAC heavily depends on you. Therefore, I would like to encourage everybody to nominate suitable candidates for the IFAC awards through the respective channels or by contacting the IFAC secretariat in Laxenburg.

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